Reclaiming Our Government

At the White House tomorrow, Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Congressional leaders from the House and Senate to talk about a plan to keep the government running beyond Tuesday night, when the current budget expires. This meeting was scheduled for last week, when Congress still had time to pass a funding measure, but that meeting was canceled by the White House. Now that there is no time to pass a negotiated spending plan before the deadline, it’s fair to assume the meeting isn’t so much about funding the government as it is about trying to control who will bear the blame. The President, who was elected to run the government, wants to say it’s not his fault that the government isn’t working.

But anyone who wants to understand what the looming government shutdown is really about should look beyond the finger-pointing in the Oval Office tomorrow to the Moral Mondays that will be happening across the South, in states where millions of people face a loss of healthcare as soon as the end of this year.

When Congress began considering the big, bad, deadly and destructive bill that made massive cuts to healthcare in order to give tax breaks to billionaires this summer, we went to Washington, D.C. with a simple request: we asked members of Congress to meet and pray with the people who would lose their healthcare if they passed the bill.

Despite the fact that the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has spent most of his public career claiming that he wants to bring faith and morality back into public life, he and his colleagues did not accept our invitation to prayer. Instead, they sent officers to arrest Suvya, a woman with cerebral palsy who knows that people like her cannot survive without the healthcare that Medicaid provides.

Tomorrow, Suvya will join low-wage workers in North Carolina who are likely to lose their healthcare before Congressional cuts to Medicaid go into effect. Hoping to put off as much of the political cost for passing unpopular legislation as possible, Congressional leaders scheduled the worst of the cuts in the big, bad, deadly, and destructive bill to go into effect after next year’s midterms. But not all of them.

This is what the government shut down in really about. Any government funding plan cannot pass the Senate without support from Democrats, and their leadership has pointed out that cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies that go into effect next year will result in a 75% cost increase for 24 million low-income workers who get their healthcare through ACA exchanges. Those families are scheduled to get letters about their rate increases in the next couple of weeks. Because most families who qualify for these credits don't have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency, this dramatic increase in the cost of healthcare will mean they can no longer afford health insurance.

The federal government is on track to shut down this week because the President and his party, who currently run the government, refuse to negotiate a plan to help millions of Americans keep their healthcare.

When a government that has ceased to serve the people shuts down, it is the job of the people to come together and reclaim the tools of government. But to take back our government, we must first reclaim the moral narrative that has misled so many of our neighbors.

We must be clear that this is not partisan deadlock shutting down the government; it’s a moral crisis that is the direct result of members of Congress abdicating their responsibility to establish justice and promote the general welfare.

This is why Moral Monday delegations are visiting Senators offices across the South tomorrow. Nearly every Senator who voted for Washington’s big, deadly, destructive bill identifies as a Christian. But the Bible says nothing that would support stripping people of basic health care or food.

The prophet Isaiah says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their right, making women and children their prey.’ This is the Bible we preach and teach. We know its call to love and care for all people, especially the most vulnerable. Policymakers have made clear that they are willing to sacrifice the poor for the consolidation of power, and it is the job of clergy and moral leaders to challenge that narrative in the public square.

But we are not coming alone, because we know it’s not the power of our words that will open people’s eyes to what’s really happening. The people who are suffering because their government is not working for them are the ones who can shift the moral narrative.

These are the people who must be heard.

These are the voices that Moral Mondays will highlight in eight Southern states tomorrow.

We don’t know for sure whether a meeting will happen at the White House, but we know that if you’re interested in building up a moral movement that can reclaim a government for the people, you can listen to the people who are showing us the way forward on the Repairers of the Breach livestream here at noon ET.

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